


Personal Fanfiction: A Sentence of a Title That Is Not Short Nor Marketable Because This Is All Online and No One Seems To Be Watching.

by Genre8



Category: Fanfiction - All Media Types
Genre: Bad Writing, Coffee, Gen, Ghosts, Good Writing, Humans, Literature, Meta, Morality, TW: Mentions of Self, TW: Mentions of fanfiction as a genre, Tea, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2016-12-15
Packaged: 2018-09-08 19:30:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8857960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Genre8/pseuds/Genre8
Summary: Some of these comments are part of the work itself. Unless you choose to read all of them as part of the work, in which case, all of the comments are part of the work. Feel free to comment!





	

#### Guide to Alternate Universes

 **Coffeeshop AU** \- Setup

I first drank coffee in the form of a mocha frappaccino, because I was busy, and was told that coffee helps one stay alert. It didn’t for me, but it gave me that lingering taste that I learned to crave. My friend, The Barista, was amused. With her guidance, I was down to black and a half sugar in a matter of months. This is how I take my coffee. The only time I add cream is when the coffee is irredeemably shitty, and in those cases, I like experimenting with flavours. Hazelnut and caramel can be good with bad gas station coffee. Peppermint creamer works when even two sugars doesn’t make it tolerable.

This is also how I take my tea. I know this is a coffeeshop AU, but we haven’t gotten to that part yet. Odd specific details are important, more so than the point. Don’t give up yet. We will get to the point. My friend, The Scot, tells me that my favourite tea is very English, which may or may not have been an insult. My first tea was a peppermint herbal, which I drank because it was handed to me in the midst of an anxiety attack. After regularly drinking peppermint, I learned to enjoy green, then black. Twinnings English Breakfast is my black tea. Steep for 2-5 minutes. Either no sugar or a half sugar.

**Werewolf AU**

Read these first, and then never again. Werewolf AUs are the worst of any given site, with little exception. What makes them necessary, however, is that each site is different. Ever since the dawn of Twilight, fanfiction and werewolves have been intertwined, and with this comes the scores of new lore.

The distinction between this AU and every other is that every site collectively agrees on one type of werewolf dynamic, which is added on to by the users every time a new story is written. There is a direct correlation between nuance of werewolf lore and skill of the site’s writers.

 **Coffeeshop AU** \- Meeting

I’ve never just sat alone in a coffeeshop, which means I can’t have been a regular, which means that this AU cannot apply to me. No clumsy young server has bumped into me, no mysterious regular has caught my eye, no barista has written their number on my receipt. My friend, The Barista, has signed to me across the room, but I love her in a purely platonic way. When I buy coffee, I do so with a lost look, a tip, and occasionally I am that guy who pays for a six USD beverage in small change. I do not linger at coffeeshops. I linger few places. I try to keep walking down the sidewalk.

**Immortal AU**

Remember with these that the author had so many AUs in mind they just couldn’t decide. Multiple lives will play out. These tend to be quite interesting AUs. Unlike two vignettes ago, the Immortals have no set site lore. These will have many settings: in ancient Rome, in modern Algeria, in WWII Germany, in the Wild West. Each time, the immortal lover finds the mortal one’s reincarnation. After a long process, they usually become lovers yet again. Only to have the mortal partner die.

My friend, The Immortal, has let me in on a secret. There are often no tests of strength, love, intelligence, or courage to free oneself from this cycle. Sometimes the mortal lover remembers all past lives and becomes immortal. Usually, they don’t. The only test is a test of patience and time. Life goes on, and the story ends after one or more repetition of the mortal lover’s cycle. They grow old, dye, and re-find the immortal lover thirty-some years later.

 **Genderbend AU** \- Identity

With my coffee, walking or skateboarding or trudging down a sidewalk, I do not change. That burly blonde man is now a stocky blonde woman, and we have entered a new phase in the process of forming our characters to feel like some representation of someone we’ve never met. She is offering her hyper intelligent and emotionally stunted girlfriend her phone number. They are not dating yet.

A disproportionate majority of fanfiction ships feature either straight relationships or gay male relationships. There are reasons for this, but let’s simply say those reasons are many, and move on. Genderbend AUs are helpful, when looking for non-dead all-female ships. Nonbinary characters are not so simple, though much less dead. We are obviously only talking about fanfiction.

**Vampire AU**

When I went into the forest to find a ghost, I found a vampire and realized that I knew this story. I knew that this was a sexual story, and that it could range from Carmilla to Dracula to some new-lore fantasy world. I told the vampire that I had work to do amidst the dead, and they told me that they were alone. I told them that I was alone. They became my friend. My friend, The Vampire.

When I visit them in the woods, they tell me that their life feels unfulfilled. I tell them to get more hobbies. After taking up wood carving, book binding, seeing a therapist, and discussing justice morality with sirens, pirates, and priests, they only feel a bit better. They realize now that they don’t need to drink blood, because their life is no more important than of those around them. Discussion question: is this good? Further discussion question: whose life is more valuable, and who decides that?

#### Guide to Canon Compliance

 **Hurt/Comfort** \- Projecting

Pain is more common in fanfiction than in most other literary genres. Here, the search for hurt trumps most other literary needs such as: flowery description, concise language, or an overarching sense of plot. This is not an AU. This is a genre necessity. If there is a chance to inflict pain or a chance to wrap up the plot and tie a bow, expect The Character to fall into a pit of despair. Expect the fic to take a twelve thousand word detour, because there wasn’t enough turmoil. Preferably, The Characters cause their own pain with flaws, insecurities, and failure to move past or acknowledge their own problems. Add a villain / opposing force only if this will complicate The Character’s introspection.

Reading about excessive levels of pain helps the readers to deal with their own pain, the writers to deal with their sadism, and the characters to change. This is a win-win-win. My friend, The Character, begs such authors to stop writing. The Character does not want change as much as the author seems to. Don’t worry about them. They are usually bad people anyway, and the reader usually needs to see ways of moving on in action. Fanfiction is all about pain and change. Comfort only comes after long periods of both.

**Passing Protagonist on Sidewalk**

My coffee burns the split on my lips and moisturizes skin. Maybe I should meet someone new. My friends all stop by now and then, but I know I have more points to prove. Someone brushes past me with the intentional shoulder-knocking I’ve only seen in movies. My coffee spills, but only a bit gets on my hand, and the rest on the cement. I look for an apology, but they’re gone, headed somewhere urgently.

It’s times like these I remember I am not the main character of this story. I side walk the important person and, after a brief scare with coffee, continue walking or skateboarding or trudging. My life is usually much less affected by the protagonist than they would assume. Oh, look. They overthrew our government. Oh, look. They instituted a new one. Fine, I’ll pay mildly higher hazelnut creamer taxes. Fine, I’ll try harder to stay healthy so I don’t have to go to the doctors they forgot to pay.

The best part about being The Coffee Spill Stranger is that I can freely die. If it’s not my story, I can die. I can die at the beginning or the middle or during the climax scene or after the epilogue. Why have freedom of speech when I could have freedom of death? Really, discussion question: why do so many genres have an issue with freedom of death? Further discussion question: is it good that a story could potentially continue without its protagonist?

 **Fantheory** \- Homelessness

I’m walking, skating, trudging. I’ve been doing so for a long time. I would go birdwatching in the park, but even with my coat it’s getting chilly. If the fantheory is that The Character has been secretly homeless while doing everything you saw/heard/read in the canonical media, then nothing else changes. If my brother were the protagonist, then until the point where the his story ends, he would know nothing of The Character’s struggles. He can’t know about what The Character faces because in the original media he did not know, so The Character holds their secret close.

As for whether a relationship springs up around this secret and its potential to be shared, and as for whether that relationship develops long past the ending of the main character’s story, well, that’s another story. I suggest reading it after the canon story.

All pretenses aside, there is sex is many fanfics. Readers like sex, writers like sex, characters like sex, so there is a lot of it. Nothing complicates emotions like sex, so there is a lot of it. I am walking through a park, taking hours to eat at 24 hour diners, and finding out where the train goes after my usual stops because I have nowhere to sleep tonight, and I like the idea of being loved with all my flaws and inconveniences, so there is a lot of it.

**Published Fic**

Fanfiction, as a literary genre, is invested in many things. These include gender, sexuality, poverty, morality, characters studies in contexts other than the original, critical setting changes to an otherwise replicated story, characters forged amidst trauma thrust into bizarrely normal lives, the stories that happen after the ends of stories, and bad people who are given good endings. I walked or skateboarded or trudged down many a sidewalk on my way to the next predetermined location, and each time, I wondered why I was in the introspective universe instead of the drafted to war one. I wondered who the protagonist was, and whether my death would be, if not the end, then a new chapter in their story.

My friend, The Fic Author, writes twenty thousand words a week and has a fanbase of over fourteen thousand readers. People make fan art of their fics, make fansongs of their fics, write fanfics of their fanfics in some sort of fanfiception, and send them pictures of their words, no longer posted online but bound and on a bookshelf, collected by a person whose passion is book binding. The Fic Author wishes sometimes that they could be paid for what they do, but The Fic Author is the illegitimate child of The Serious Writer, who tells them that what they do is not an art. The Fic Author foolishly tries to market their work as fanfiction, instead of serious fiction, and is ridiculed.

**Author's Note:**

> Some of these comments are part of the work itself. Unless you choose to read all of them as part of the work, in which case, all of the comments are part of the work. Feel free to comment!


End file.
